Concordia

Concordia Winter 2018 11 Concordia Winter 2018 10 the leadership in the school is now in very capable hands. The spring term used to be our cross-country season, with a full fixture list of inter-school races, large and small. I much enjoyed this, and it carried on for a good number of years, but we were not the only school to find it harder and harder to keep teams going. Even once Emma Coleman and David Lawrence, both very talented runners, were in charge, the decline continued. What reversed the trend was the arrival of James Manley at the school. It is a pleasure now to see so many of his protegés working so hard for him, happy to benefit from his knowledgeable and patient encouragement. And he does not think only about the elite. The reintroduction after countless years of the whole-school entry for the inter-house races was at his instigation, and was not something I would have dared suggest myself. I was lucky that from my first year at the school I was invited by Geoff Colley to join the CCF Easter trips to Glen Nevis, in the Scottish Highlands. A group of about a dozen pupils and not many adults would spend a week in a small and remote hut. By day we climbed the surrounding peaks, all under snow at that time of year; back at base, we were fed and generally looked after by the inimitable RSM Jim Green. That sort of trip would be much more difficult now, if only because of worries about adults and pupils sharing confined accommodation. Pity, since that was the side of the CCF I enjoyed most during my eight years of involvement. Then, for me, came the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. That too took me to a variety of remote spots round the country, sometimes for large-scale trips involving eighty or more pupils, and sometimes just one group of maybe half a dozen. For the last few years, the Gold and Silver expeditions have been organised very professionally by an outside organisation. So the way the school offers the Award has changed over the years, but in many ways the experience and the rewards have been the same for all the generations. and industrious, Further Maths A-level has been a much more attractive option than its predecessor from the 1970s. The area of the Sixth-Form syllabus which has expanded most has been Statistics. There used to be but one class a year taking this option, taught by the much respected head of department, James Clark. When I started, handheld calculators were still a novelty. I understand that the school had in their possession a collection of larger machines for these statisticians; they were mechanical rather than electronic, and noisy enough that when it came to the exam, they had to be in a room on their own. The generation of pupils who arrived at the school at the same time as myself were about the first who were expected each to have their own calculator. I have been lucky that my years of teaching have seen a big expansion in the supply from external sources of more unusual and interesting mathematical material, all trying to encourage pupils to apply their knowledge in unpredictable ways. We now have the multiple-choice Maths Challenges at three different age-groups, with their follow-up Olympiads for the higher achievers; there are the inter-school team competitions; and there is a wealth of material arriving throughout the year, in the monthly so-called mentoring sheets. Utilitarian-minded pupils please note: we have it on the authority of university admissions personnel that success with this material strongly enhances a candidate’s chances when applying for any Mathematics- based course, as well as being rewarding in its own right. It is now something of a memory test to think of the other calls the school made on my time in earlier days. One of the bigger ones was taking junior tennis teams, despite my own awkwardness on court. It is all very different nowadays, with a very capable colleague in charge. No longer are school matches doubles only, with each pair playing six sets (and the ball going higher and higher and the rallies getting longer and longer as the afternoon turned into evening). One thing that worked well for a number of years, but which would be quite impossible now, was a singles knock-out tournament held over the summer term. Pupils from the Divisions and below could enter, and once the draw was published they had to seek out their opponents and arrange a time to play, either in the Hour or after school. For all that we now have email, it is hard to imagine a current pupil contacting someone he doesn’t know, from a different year-group; nor are they likely to want to stay on after school, whilst in the Hour the hard tennis courts are largely taken up with informal football. The other sport which has been important to me throughout has been running. Again, the format has changed over the years; and again, “If ways of presenting Mathematics to a class have evolved as technology has developed over the years, much of the content has stayed the same.” “My thanks to generations of pupils for having made Taylors’ such a stimulating and rewarding environment.” Well, now it is coming to an end. I said above that I had not originally expected to be here for anything like this length of time, but I have no regrets for having let it turn out that way. My thanks to generations of pupils for having made Taylors’ such a stimulating and rewarding environment. Michael Illing is congratulated by Varun Paul on his ten years as Head of Andrewes in 2003 Michael Illing pictured with boys from the Senior Team Maths Challenge in 2017